According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much else that’s wrong with the world. This is part of a strategy to demonize Charles and David Koch—the principals behind the country’s largest privately-held company—and make them the issue come Election Day. There’s a big problem with this strategy, however: a recent poll shows that most of Reid’s own constituents haven’t the slightest idea who the Brothers Koch are.

Daniel Schulman’s much anticipated book, the first biography of the Koch family, may help voters bridge the knowledge gap—but Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think it will help their smear campaign. Indeed, it is likely to do the opposite. It’s hard to write a biography of someone you hate, and Schulman, a writer for Mother Jones, clearly came to admire his subjects.

The story starts with Fred Koch, a son of Dutch immigrants who settled in the “poor but plucky” town of Quanah, east of the Texas panhandle. Ambitious, single-minded, and tough as nails, Fred made his fortune helping Joe Stalin extract oil from the Russian steppes—learning in the process that the rosy picture of a “workers’ paradise” drawn by the likes of Walter Duranty was the exact opposite of the truth.

Driven to seek overseas markets by an onslaught of patent-infringement lawsuits from a Rockefeller-connected oil consortium, Fred Koch arrived in Russia in 1930 and “found it a land of hunger, misery, and terror,” as he would later recall. When he left that autumn, his Soviet minder—who had spent the whole time capitalist-baiting him—bid adieu with this warning: “I’ll see you in the United States sooner than you think.” What Fred had seen in Stalin’s Russia set him on a course that landed him in the ranks of the John Birch Society.

Robert Welch, the society’s founder, recruited him early on: Fred was at the 1958 meeting where Welch first laid out his plan to fight the Communist menace and roll back the New Deal. The John Birch Society was a hybrid of Old Right libertarian economics and the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s, and Fred—by this time a tycoon—relentlessly lectured his four sons on the evils of collectivism and the value of hard work. He had no intention of raising a brood of “country-club bums” who would coast along on the family fortune. The 1950s were almost over before he bought the kids a television, and even then they had little time to watch it.

They had no allowance, only the money they earned by manual labor. While the children of the upper crust cavorted in the pool at the Wichita Country Club across the road from the Koch compound, Fred’s boys were out in the fields getting calluses on their hands: mending fences, driving tractors, milking cows, pulling weeds, and doing the work required to maintain their father’s ranches. They “were treated no differently than lowly cowhands.”

Schulman tells the story of one summer when a teenage Charles was sent to Montana’s Centennial Valley, where he stayed in a cabin with one Bitterroot Bob, “who was known to take potshots at flies as he lay in bed at night cradling his pistol.” On the journey back to school one autumn, he and a ranch hand stopped for lunch in Dillon, where “Charles glanced around the divey restaurant. ‘It sure is clean here,’ he said.”

“Trips to the family ranches were not vacations,” writes Schulman, “they were yet another opportunity for Fred to break his children of any privileged tendencies through long days of labor.” Pretty egalitarian for a family that has been caricatured as 21st-century Bourbons. Schulman shatters the myth and drills down to the reality, hitting paydirt all along the way.

Sons Frederick, Charles, David, and Bill—the latter twins—each reacted in his own way to their father’s stern regime, and in turn they interacted with each other in a way that generated a family saga with the drama of “Downton Abbey” and the message of Atlas Shrugged. This is the spine of Schulman’s narrative: a tale of loyalty and betrayal, rivalry and retribution, of larger-than-life characters driven by a family legacy they each aspired to live up to.

The exception is Frederick Koch, now 80, the contrary of his father and the rest of the brood. As a child he was sensitive, artistic, and devoted to his glamorous mother, the former Mary Clementine Robinson, an “extrovert who seemed most in her element buzzing around a cocktail party: in short, the exact opposite of her no-nonsense old country boy of a husband.” Yet the couple complemented each other. In the case of the somewhat effeminate Frederick, however, opposites did not attract. Indeed, Fred seems to have been so repulsed by his son—whom he later practically cut out of his will—that he disappeared Frederick from a bio in John Birch Society brochures, which said the JBS National Council member only had three sons.

Young Freddy was sent off to prep school and was rarely heard from until the family drama reached its climax after the father’s death. Always apart, he chose Harvard while the other three brothers went to MIT, where the hot competition that had raged between Charles and Bill—often expressed in pugilistic terms—cooled to a slow simmer. David was the easygoing one: athletic, even-tempered, and well-liked, he was the virtual opposite of his twin Bill, who was emotional, aloof, and often vindictive. Charles was a more cerebral version of his father: steady, goal-oriented, the archetypal entrepreneur out of an Ayn Rand novel.

After graduating, Charles worked for a Boston consulting firm for a couple of years, resisting his father’s insistence that he come home to Wichita and run the family business. Finally, old Fred flat-out told him if he didn’t come back he was going to sell the company.

Charles returned in 1961 to find the patriarch’s health failing. On November 17, 1967, Fred was out duck hunting when he saw one directly overhead and took careful aim. As the duck dropped from the sky he exclaimed, “Boy, that was a magnificent shot!” And then died.

At the age of 32, Charles found himself at the head of a corporate empire that included oil interests, vast swathes of ranchland, an engineering division—which he had spent the last six years building up—and other holdings. By 1968, the company he renamed in honor of his father was worth some $1.7 billion in today’s dollars. (The combined worth of Charles and David now tops $100 billion.)

How did he do it? With a business philosophy that combined lessons learned at his father’s knee with those learned in the rough-and-tumble spontaneous order of the market. Charles Koch has the skills of a general and the mind of a philosopher, as any reader of his book The Science of Success can see. In it, he applies the theories of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics to the problem of how to address the company’s core capabilities—the ability to create valuable products out of raw commodities—to new markets. Expansion is the leitmotif of his career, but with this proviso: “Koch companies have suffered,” he wrote, “when we forgot we were experimenting and made bets as if we knew what we were doing.”

When he took over from his father, Charles not only immersed himself in the details of the business but also undertook a systematic study of philosophy, economics, political science, and history because he understood that the success of his company—his life’s work—depended on the condition of the society it was selling to and serving. This was his doorway to libertarianism.

In the early 1960s, Charles attended the Freedom School, a modest lodge surrounded by little cabins set amid the scenic foothills of Colorado’s Rampart mountain range. There he listened to the lectures of the school’s founder and leading light, the libertarian pacifist Robert LeFevre, an idiosyncratic figure whose charisma and absolute devotion to the idea of a stateless society—which he called “autarchy”—attracted support from a variety of wealthy businessmen. The school also attracted the then-obscure Milton Friedman, novelist Rose Wilder Lane, economist Gordon Tullock, and the legendary libertarian journalist Frank Chodorov.

Upon returning to Wichita, Charles discovered the works of Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and the existentialist psychologist Abraham Maslow, among others. His father’s relentless political instructions and moral maxims were significantly modified by reading the libertarian greats, who inspired this man of action to immerse himself in a small and at that time little-known movement.

Amid the tumult of the 1960s and the Vietnam war, the cadres of the nascent libertarian movement were shaking off their submergence in the Cold War right of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review and harkening back to an older tradition: the libertarian anti-interventionism of 1930s conservatism. This current had practically faded out of existence as McCarthyism swept the 1950s and the Buckleyites recruited rightward-moving Trotskyists like James Burnham and former Stalinists like Willi Schlamm. These leftists turned militant anti-Communists were the ancestors of today’s neoconservatives, who finally emerged in great numbers during the 1960s as “Scoop Jackson Democrats”—named after the hawkish Washington senator—battling the children’s crusade around Eugene McCarthy, the 1968 peace candidate of the left.

The Birchers were initially against the Vietnam War, due in part to Welch’s paranoia—he thought it was a Communist plot to entrap America—and in part to the society’s heritage: it had preserved some remnants of the Old Right tradition, reprinting Garet Garrett’s classic anti-New Deal anti-interventionist screed The People’s Pottage, which lamented the rise of an American empire. But under pressure from their war-mongering base and a constant stream of denunciations from National Review, JBS founder-leader Robert Welch changed his position to “Victory, Then Peace,” as Schulman points out.

Welch wound up denouncing the fiercely antiwar LeFevre, and the Koch brothers took LeFevre’s side. Together with Bob Love, an old Bircher and wealthy businessman who had been Fred’s good friend, Charles took out a full-page ad in the Wichita Eagle headlined “Let’s Get Out of Vietnam Now!”

Jane Mayer, in her 2010 New Yorker jeremiad attacking the Kochs, made light of the more colorful aspects of LeFevre’s thought, but it was his influence that sent one of the wealthiest and most politically influential figures on the American right down the road to a more humane and enlightened philosophy.

A fork in that road was Charles’s developing relationship with the economist Murray Rothbard, the intellectual progenitor of modern libertarianism and the ideological polestar of the Ron Paul phenomenon. Rothbard, like Charles, was not content to sit around theorizing. At a seminal meeting at a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado, in the winter of 1976, the two discussed what course to take—and what came to be known as the “Kochtopus” was born.

Rothbard wrote a lengthy memo outlining an ambitious plan that would come to fruition with the injection of a large amount of Koch funding. There would be a think tank, a magazine, a campus group, seminars and grants for promising libertarian scholars—all of which came to pass in the form of the Cato Institute; Inquiry, a biweekly directed at the left; a movement magazine, Libertarian Review; and a campus group dubbed Students for a Libertarian Society (SLS).

To manage this operation, Charles and Rothbard recruited Edward H. Crane III, a young financial consultant and stockbroker whose tenure as head of the barely four-year-old Libertarian Party had demonstrated rare organizational abilities. A four-story glass-and-steel building at the foot of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill was secured to house Cato, while across the street the ancillary organizations—SLS, Libertarian Review, and the Libertarian Party—took up residence in a converted warehouse.

From the first months of 1977 to the summer of 1979, Cato was the epicenter of a veritable hive of libertarian activism. When Ed Clark, an oil executive, garnered 5.5 percent of the vote as the Libertarian Party candidate for California governor in 1978, the buzzing got louder. As the 1980 presidential election loomed, with Clark poised to carry the Libertarian banner, expectations were high. Charles kept a close eye on all this, conferring with Crane on a daily basis.

This activity reached a crescendo at the 1979 Libertarian Party convention, held in Los Angeles’s Bonaventure Hotel, where Clark was nominated for president with David Koch as his running mate. The presence of a Koch on the ticket was openly explained as a way to get around campaign-finance laws, which favored the major parties by limiting campaign contributions and thus ensuring that no third party could challenge the duopoly.

What happened next was a tragedy brought about by the failure of Charles to apply his own Market-Based Management (MBM) principles to the task he was undertaking. Far from the decentralized decision-making advocated in The Science of Success, the Clark campaign was run from the top down by Ed Crane. Another principle of MBM is integrity, which Koch defines as an essential element of “principled entrepreneurship.” This too was thrown by the wayside as Crane insisted on watering down the libertarian message. The final straw was Clark’s interview with Ted Koppel on “Nightline,” where he explained that libertarianism is really “low-tax liberalism.”

Rothbard blew his top. From that point on, a factional war erupted within the Kochtopus. It didn’t end until the 1983 national Libertarian Party convention, where “Boss Crane” was narrowly defeated and the “Crane Machine” walked out of the party en masse. Cato, under Crane’s leadership, hightailed it to Washington, D.C., eager to put as much physical and ideological distance as possible between the “respectable radicalism,” as Crane put it, of the Koch-funded wing and the unmanageable libertarian grassroots. At a special meeting of the Cato board, Rothbard was summarily kicked out.

“The proper epitaph for the Clark campaign,” Rothbard pithily summed up, “is this: And they didn’t even get the votes!” Libertarian principle had been traduced, the party platform ignored, and still Clark received less than 1 percent, not even breaking one million votes.

The Kochs were soon besieged on another front, as an enemy within raised his head to challenge Charles and David—brother Bill. Throughout their childhood, Bill had fiercely competed with Charles: although their sojourn at MIT had relieved the tensions for a while, Bill’s resentment resurfaced. Haunted by the idea that his parents had favored Charles over him, he lashed out at his two brothers and their mother over Christmas dinner 1979, making such a scene that their mother got up and walked out. The family would never spend the holidays together again.

Bill unleashed his rage in a series of lawsuits—including a “whistleblower” suit in which he asked the Environmental Protection Agency to penalize Koch Industries for alleged malfeasance—and became a nemesis who would dog Charles and David for many years. The key battle in this war was an attempt by Bill and his allies on the Koch board to take over the company. Frederick, who owned some 15 percent of the shares, came out of the woodwork to side with Bill. The ploy almost succeeded: it wasn’t until J. Howard Marshall II, their father’s old business partner, persuaded his sons who owned shares not to go along with the coup that Charles escaped Bill’s wrath.

But it didn’t end there: employing private investigators who went through Charles’s and David’s garbage, bugging phones, and slandering his brothers in public, nothing was out of bounds as far as Bill was concerned. As portrayed by Schulman, vindictive is too mild a word to describe “Wild Bill.” Pathological is more like it, and this is clearly Schulman’s view as he describes Bill’s tantrums and his Machiavellian machinations to bring his brothers down.

It was a battle on a titanic scale, one Bill eventually lost, albeit only after inflicting years of public brawls and emotional pain on his brothers. Charles and David emerged scarred but unbowed. Charles was determined to make his mark on a country he saw going into irreversible decline: having abandoned third-party politics, he and David undertook an “entryist” strategy that involved influencing the larger conservative movement and the Republican Party in a libertarian direction. A brace of front groups were set up: Americans for Prosperity (initially called Citizens for a Sound Economy) and others with anodyne-sounding names. They also continued to fund the old Institute for Humane Studies, as well as the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center. But this time Charles was determined to do it right.

Schulman loses his objectivity to a significant degree when his narrative gets to the Obama years. The Tea Party is described as little more than a gang of panting Neanderthals motivated by dark allusions to race. One Tea Party leader is described as “exuding the slippery persona of a car salesman or a TV evangelist”—salesmen and religious folk being inherently dubious from the perspective of a writer for Mother Jones. Yet this fit of ideological fury soon passes, and as Schulman resumes his tempered and eminently fair tone he relates the fascinating story of the Kochs’ move “out of the shadows.”

While there were still tensions between the Koch organization and the conservative Republicans he once denounced—Karl Rove “couldn’t count on the Kochs to fall in step on issues such as immigration, civil liberties, or defense,” reports Schulman—Charles’s strategy of muting libertarian principles in pursuit of a “popular front”-style campaign was basically unchanged from the early days of the Kochtopus. Only instead of trying to pass off libertarianism as “low-tax liberalism,” his new tactic was to pass it off as a subset of conservatism.

Charles began organizing regular meetings of well-heeled conservative donors, including major funders of neoconservative groups, in a characteristically single-minded pursuit of his goal: defeating Obama. Every cog in the Koch political machine was mobilized to carry out the mission. This did not sit well with Ed Crane, still presiding over Cato and who had become distanced from Charles over the years. The conflict came to a head when Charles and Crane traveled to Moscow to convene a conference celebrating the end of Soviet socialism. Charles, Schulman relates, was so moved by the event that he asked Crane if he could address the crowd of more than 1,000. Crane told him no, and Charles was on a plane home the next day—perhaps justifiably miffed at his exclusion from an event his largesse had made possible.

Charles denies this ever occurred and says instead he had concerns over the conference agenda, but there was plainly bad blood between him and Crane. Speaking of the man who made his career as the head of a respected think tank possible, Crane told Jane Mayer: “He’s the emperor, and he thinks he’s wearing clothes.” There was room for only one emperor at Cato, and Crane was determined it wasn’t going to be Charles.

But Charles and David owned Cato shares, and these entitled them to appoint new board members. At the next board meeting, Crane blew his top. Ranting at the new appointees, whom he called “Koch operatives,” he stomped out of the room.

The charge was that Charles and David wanted to drag Cato into politics by providing “intellectual ammunition” to the array of action-oriented nonprofits, like Americans for Prosperity, they were readying for an assault on the White House. Cato, it was said by Crane’s supporters, would lose all credibility if it became associated with Charles Koch and his company. That the think tank had been generously funded by Charles from the beginning was hardly a secret: if the association discredited them, the damage had been done long ago.

Crane was finally convinced to exit Cato: in exchange, Charles and David agreed to change the unique organizational charter that had kept the institute securely within the Koch family orbit. It was Rothbard’s revenge: the libertarian lodestar had gone to his reward in 1995, but Murray’s followers watched the coup play out in the media with more than a shade of schadenfreude. Having cleared the decks, Charles and David readied themselves for the showdown with President Obama. They latched onto Mitt Romney as the instrument of their hopes.

There is, oddly, no mention here of the one person most Americans associate with the libertarian cause: Ron Paul is completely absent from these pages. Supporting him apparently wasn’t even a remote possibility for the Kochs. This might be baffling to the outside observer, but there is a good reason for it: the historic division in the libertarian movement stretching back to 1983, when Crane and the Kochs split with Rothbard. After this two movements existed side by side, sometimes trading potshots but more often simply ignoring each other, like former lovers who avert their eyes whenever they run into each other on the street.

Fiercely competitive, shocked by the ferocity of the left’s coordinated attack on their integrity, and fearing for the fate of the business to which they had devoted their lives, Charles and David were so invested in their anti-Obama crusade that they forgot the first principle of Market-Based Management, that “Koch companies have suffered when we forgot we were experimenting and made bets as if we knew what we were doing.”

Schulman reports David’s shock as the election results came in: he was monitoring the news “with disbelief,” according to a close friend. While “the stars had seemed aligned for the political transformation the Kochs and their allies had dreamt of,” somehow victory had eluded them. David blamed the Tea Party, “bone-headed candidates” who talked about social issues, and an extended primary process that had supposedly hobbled Romney from the start. “We got to do better with primaries,” David declared—as if giving the Ron Pauls of this world less opportunity to expose the hollowness of the establishment would somehow increase the Republican Party’s appeal to the public.

“All the plotting and planning, the donor conclaves, the piles of money—it hardly seemed worth it” to the brothers, writes Schulman. “Charles and David had taken a high profile stand. … They had accepted the scorn, the death threats and the damage to their family legacy. But in the end they had paid the price without reaping the reward.” Or as Rothbard would put it: “And they didn’t even get the votes!”

Sons of Wichita pinpoints the dilemma at the heart of the Koch saga: the inability to translate theory into practice. Schulman quotes a former Koch executive close to the brothers who says they “won’t likely repeat the errors of 2012” because “they are smart people. They learn from their mistakes.” They can only learn, however, by identifying the nature of their error, and one big factor may be standing in the way: their enormous pride.

The initial frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination is the son of a man who represents the other strand of libertarianism, the one they broke with 15 years ago. While Charles and David were looking for immediate gratification with Romney and ignoring the longer term political battle, Ron Paul was building a real grassroots movement, a solid launching pad for his son, the junior senator from Kentucky. The Kochs made an alliance of convenience with Karl Rove—but do they have the humility to make an alliance of principle with their former comrades to put Rand Paul in the White House?

We’ll know soon enough.

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com.

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45 Responses to Koch Brothers: The Real Thing

“According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much else that’s wrong with the world. This is part of a strategy to demonize Charles and David Koch—the principals behind the country’s largest privately-held company—and make them the issue come Election Day. There’s a big problem with this strategy, however: a recent poll shows that most of Reid’s own constituents haven’t the slightest idea who the Brothers Koch are.”

you are pretty much letting the world know that your entire article will be an attack on a straw man. Whether Reid actually said that the Koch brothers were responsible for global warning and much else that is wrong in the world, or not, and whether folks in Nevada know who the Koch brothers are, or not, is hardly the crux of the matter.

Democrats and liberals, by and large, criticize (or, if you insist, “demonize”) the Koch brothers, because they have used their vast wealth to advance reactionary politics, reactionary politicians, reactionary think tanks, and their own financial interests (both directly, through sweetheart deals and contracts with the government and indirectly, through their opposition to taxation and regulation generally), contrary to what Democrats and liberals perceive to be the best interests of the country. And they have been able to do so because of a series of SCOTUS and other court rulings that have made attempts to neutralize the power of great wealth in politics almost impossible. The Koch brothers, in short, have been the dollars behind the Powell Project.

That’s why libs and Dems don’t like them and say bad things about them. And have made a “coordinated attack” on them. The Koch brothers personify all that the left believe is wrong not only about the substance of American policy, but with the politics that produces that policy as well.

I fail to see what is nefarious in all that, and if the Koch brothers have received death threats, well, that is par for the course for any Americans prominent in politics, or indeed, prominent in any way at all that smacks of controversy. Nor do I see any “smear campaign” on the part of the left. The left simply documents the attempts of the Koch brothers to influence elections, legislation and policy. And it is factually accurate to say that they have been very active in doing just that.

Really, I am not quite sure where this persecution complex comes from. Folks who jump feet first into national and multi State politics, who support candidate after candidate in race after race, in all sorts of elections, who attempt to influence law making and executive policy at all levels of government, and so on, and who do so from a highly charged, partisan POV, one which also seems to advance themselves and their social class, can hardly expect to live quiet, retiring lives like some run of the ranch multimillionaire/billionaire who sticks to his knitting and maybe has a charitable foundation or two.

Nor, quite frankly, do I think the story of the Koch brothers’ hard work as boys and young men, their various feuds with other family members and political figures, the intramural squabbles at CATO, and so on, really matter all that much, if the central take away is supposed to be that the fiendish left has it all wrong about them. The left sees them as an endless supply of wealth for politics and policies that it abhors, and that is what it portrays them as. And, in fact, that is what the Koch brothers are.

Can we note that Antiwar.com is primarily funded by the Randolph Bourne Institute … which is primarily funded by the Donors Trust, Inc … which is funded to an undisclosed degree by the Kochs.

Not that this should necessarily cast doubt on Raimondo’s objectivity on this subject – but without full disclosure of associations and financial ties, can a libertarian society really exist?

Worth noting at the same time that Donors Trust, Inc, is one of the largest financial contributors to various anti-climate change think tanks and publicity mills. Interestingly, Raimondo mentions Reed’s attacks on the Koch’s support for climate change denialism in the first paragraph, then drops the subject like a hot potato. Perhaps debunking that allegation was too daunting a task, which is why Raimondo instead simply decides to slight it with a hand wave of hyperbole “According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming” and hope nobody notices.

There is actually a considerable amount to admire about the Koch’s work ethic and philanthropy. That admiration does not rebut an assertion that the Koch’s political activities have been seriously harmful to America and to the environment.

You have almost every billionaire in the Forbes list that either openly backs your cause or at least keeps silent and does not dare to criticize the status quo. And the status quo is mostly what you support not what the Kochs want, that does not make them the reactionary.

You don’t know where the persecution complex comes from ? How about your start with the fact that senior politicians single out people by name in public.

Reading this reminds me the point against Romney which was it is hard for the American voter to support their boss for President. The difference between Ron Paul and Charles Koch is Ron Paul is relatively one of us while Charles Koch was given every advantage and took every advantage to become a tremendous success. (And would have been a success no matter where he was born.)

Voting for Charles Koch is sort like voting for Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life.

Rand Paul would sell his mother for the presidency while Ron Paul wrote out the invoice. The Kochs are simply looking for a winner. That winner may or may not be Rand Paul, but let’s not pretend that it’s about some transcendent moment of libertarianism for which the American people have cried out.

I realize Koch Industries, Inc. is a giant, privately-held company, but you’re NOT correct in reporting that it is the biggest privately held company in the U.S. That distinction belongs to Cargill, Inc., which is among the largest food processors in the world. Please do your homework when reporting, please.

Reading this interesting article made me realize how little I knew about the Koch brothers. I assumed they embraced neocon foreign policy like most GOP donors. It is quite surprising they chose to promote Romney. Perhaps they thought somebody without convictions of his own would embrace theirs.

Schulman loses his objectivity to a significant degree when his narrative gets to the Obama years. The Tea Party is described as little more than a gang of panting Neanderthals motivated by dark allusions to race.

This sounds severe, but based on what the Kochs have to say about the Tea Party, it sounds like they basically agree with this conclusion. They want libertarian economics and libertarian social policy, and are infuriated when their Popular Front Outreach to the Rednecks freights their movement with social conservative baggage.

balconesfault:

Not that this should necessarily cast doubt on Raimondo’s objectivity on this subject – but without full disclosure of associations and financial ties, can a libertarian society really exist?

If the last few years is any evidence, it’s pretty clear that secret financial ties are a necessary prerequisite to a libertarian society.

I said it doesn’t actually matter what Reid said about the Koch brothers and global warming, not that he didn’t say it. Again, that is a red herring/straw man. Clearly, the Koch brothers are not personally, solely responsible for global warning, but that is hardly a fair and accurate account or summary of the left’s problem with them.

As for the “billionaires” who “back” my “cause,” and are on the side of the “status quo” (even assuming, as you do, that those are the same thing), their existence does not mean the Koch brothers are not reactionaries. Reactionaries are folks who want to take us back to some form of politics and policies out of the past. And libertarians, particularly pro business, pro laissez faire libertarians, like the Koch brothers, explicitly say they want to do just that (ie to knock out the Great Society, the New Deal, and most of the work of the Progressive Era as well).

As an aside, I would add in regard to those billionaires who supposedly “back” my “cause,” it is not as if the Right does not criticize (“attack,” “smear,” “demonize”) them as well. Why is it OK for the Right to go on and on endlessly about George Soros, but the Left is somehow playing dirty pool if it goes on about the Koch brothers?

And, finally, as another poster mentioned, having your name mentioned is hardly “persecution.” You want to be an influential public figure, you want to help shape and perhaps remake national politics, you want to undo the “status quo?” Well then it is hardly unfair when people who disagree with your agenda point out your efforts to get it enacted into law and policy. Why would it be? If the Koch brother can’t stand the heat they should stay out of the kitchen!

I love all of the history in this article. The Rose Wilder Lane, who attended the Freedom School, was the only child of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Little House on the Prairie fame. Ed Clark, the 1980 Libertarian candidate, was Rose’s adopted son.

FYI,”balconesfault,” Donors Trust is an all-purpose conduit for charitable giving and has no affiliation with the Kochs. To my knowledge, Antiwar.com has never received a single penny of Koch money — unfortunately. Although we are just the sort of group he’s always dreamed of funding — one that is a) self-supporting & b) grateful to its donors. Grateful enough, that is, not to attack them in the public square.

It’s wonderfully hypocritical for Harry Reid to attempt to demonize the Koch brothers,while he panders to billionaire Democrat donors George Soros and Tom Steyer and when it comes to fellow Nevadan,the billionaire neoconservative donor Sheldon Adelson,Reid says,“Now, Sheldon Adelson’s social views are in keeping with the Democrats. On choice, on all kinds of things. So, Sheldon Adelson, don’t pick on him. He’s not in it to make money.”

Thank you for your response. I do wish there was more openness in the money channeled around between many of these groups, but from the outside it looks an awful lot like the types of shell corporations that money launderers set up to keep the real sources hidden, until tracing cash flow looks sometimes like a series of Russian dolls, sometimes like a labyrinthine network designed to create plausible deniability for all parties involved.

I’ll take your word for it that you do not know of a direct connection between Antiwar.com’s funding and the Kochs that would ingratiate you to them. I am somewhat skeptical of your having done sufficient due diligence to make the claim “Donors Trust … has no affiliation with the Kochs”. Before making such a claim, I would hope you’ve done sufficient due diligence, since were it proven in the future that the Kochs were heavily influential in how Donors Trust spread around money this would certainly damage your credibility.

Unfortunately, when the veil of secrecy is so tightly drawn, people are bound to come to different conclusions, particularly given some of the highly politicized causes Donors Trust funds. Here are some examples:

“FYI,’balconesfault,’ Donors Trust is an all-purpose conduit for charitable giving and has no affiliation with the Kochs. To my knowledge, Antiwar.com has never received a single penny of Koch money — unfortunately. Although we are just the sort of group he’s always dreamed of funding — one that is a) self-supporting & b) grateful to its donors. Grateful enough, that is, not to attack them in the public square.”

That seems more than a little bit disingenuous. Donor’s Trust itself says that “It is all too common for philanthropic capital…to stray from the original donor’s wishes and the free market principles that made their philanthropy possible in the first place.” And that it is “an antidote to this drift.” It goes on to say that Donors’ Trust was established to “promote liberty,” and “to ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise.” And that “Donors Trust provides an innovative charitable vehicle for donors who wish to safeguard their charitable intent to fund organizations that undergird America’s founding principles.”

Thus, whatever Donor Trust is, it is not simply an “all purpose conduit for giving.” Rather, it is a conduit for giving with a particular purpose in mind, ie the support of reactionary politics.

And while DT may have no formal affiliation with the Koch brothers, there have been many allegations that they are heavy contributors, and the anonymous nature of DT contributions makes these impossible to disprove. Moreover, circumstantial evidence, such as the membership of the various boards running DT and its “advisor” group, supports those accusations.

So, while it is perhaps technically true that to your “knowledge” Antiwar.com has never received any Koch money, that is a misleading statement. If it receives Donors’ Trust money (which you don’t deny) then there is in fact a very strong probability that it has received Koch money and, moreover, that is not a secret to anyone receiving DT money.

Finally, while gratitude and loyalty are fine things, poster balconesfault did not say or imply otherwise. Rather, he only asked for full disclosure:

“Not that this [the receipt by Antiwar.com of what is very likely Koch money] should necessarily cast doubt on Raimondo’s objectivity on this subject – but without full disclosure of associations and financial ties, can a libertarian society really exist?”

I worked briefly for a Koch-owned company when it bought a plant that I worked for and that gave me an interesting perspective on Charles Koch. Of all of the companies I worked at, it was easily the most ethical. There were a number of times that the company took a very conservative position to avoid any potential violation, when other companies I’ve worked for would have went right up to the limit. On the other hand, it had the least tolerance for diverse opinions that I’ve ever seen. The MBM concept where they say they empower employees and let the good ideas win out is a farce. There is a Koch way of doing business. If you support those predispositions, you are allowed a fair amount leverage. If not, you will be marginalized. My job was relatively techy job. The Koch companies generally do not value technology. The plant that I worked at was far advanced technologically beyond their facilities. I needed funding multiple times to maintain systems that had proven to increase profitability significantly, and were industry-standard. The installed management team, who was schooled in the Koch way, would not even entertain the requests.

It’s beginning to look like “philadelphialawyer” (just one more of the many social mediators who lack the courage to write under a real name, unlike Justin Raimondo), spends a considerable amount of time giving specious arguments contra good essays in The American Conservative. I wonder who funds him (or her, as the pc crowd now requires us to say)?

No one funds me. I am an individual person who has commented, over the years, on many internet sites. I would also note that my internet commenting is not exactly the same thing, in terms of its impact on national politics and policy, as billionaires giving millions and millions of dollars to political campaigns, political causes and ideological think tanks. As for my anonymity, that has always been accepted practice for internet commenters and has nothing to do with “courage.” What a “social mediator” is I’m not sure, but I don’t use social media, if that is the implication. And as to my arguments, I am always willing to defend them. If you consider them specious, perhaps you would trouble yourself to explain why, and then I could respond in substance.

I am one, totally “unfunded,” person giving my opinions and making arguments for them. And I think it speaks well of Justin Raimondo, and most of the other writers here at TAC, that they allow dissenting voices to be heard. One sided conversations, even if they are on “your” side, are rather boring, which is why I actually prefer to comment here more than on liberal sites.

The great irony of the Koch brothers is that despite their opposition to the current administration, they made approximately half of their wealth in the period since 2008.

This shows once more that ideologies are silly.

One cannot come up with a better society through deductive reasoning. There is no set of principles that when strictly applied leads to a better world. A better society is created by hard work and constructive debate over concrete problems.

Based on libertarian thinking, the Koch’s should have lost billions, instead each brother made an additional $20 billion in just 6 years time.

Maybe the brothers should actually thank the current administration for helping to create the environment that allowed them to get ahead.

Charles Koch,
“Far from trying to rig the system, I have spent decades opposing cronyism and all political favors, including mandates, subsidies and protective tariffs—even when we benefit from them. I believe that cronyism is nothing more than welfare for the rich and powerful, and should be abolished.

Koch Industries was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011. That government handout (which cost taxpayers billions) needlessly drove up food and fuel prices as well as other costs for consumers—many of whom were poor or otherwise disadvantaged. Now the mandate needs to go, so that consumers and the marketplace are the ones who decide the future of ethanol.”

To the above comments on “Donors Trust”: Again, Donors Trust, whatever its ideological orientation, dispenses money from a wide variety of … donors. Contributors earmark their money to specific nonprofits: there is no reason to think the Kochs have given money to Antiwar.com. Indeed, there is every reason to think they haven’t given my history with them. Not that this will satisfy the nutcases who insist on making a connection.

I _wish_ the Kochs would donate, however, and hope that they will in some future time when the two strands of our movement come together. As can be seen in the above article, I admire Charles (and David), but I’m not holding my breath waiting for their check.

It was highly unrealistic of the Kochs to think that Romney, whose Romneycare begat Obamacare, could win. They should have talked to the working-class Americans among whom their father raised them about Romney, who was raised among Michigan’s auto elite.

I don’t care 2 cents what the Kochs do on a political level, but let me say on a personal level that one of the reasons for their success is that they do not treat their employees well. We worked at Koch for over 5 years and we were worked to the bone, treated very badly by untrained and unsuitable bosses, and never saw a single bonus!!(and yet at times were some of the top performers in the area) I guess if you want to be one of the richest men in the US on the backs of your employees go right ahead. I for one would never return to work at a Koch company.

Justin … that last response really didn’t do you much credit.
a) Previously you asserted “Donors Trust … has no affiliation with the Kochs”. In your more recent response you noted “Contributors earmark their money to specific nonprofits”.

So by the logic in your second statement – which I have no reason to doubt – were the Kochs giving money to Donors Trust, then they would likely be earmarking the money they gave to Donors Trust to be passed through to specific recipients.

Thus, either you have evidence that the Kochs have not given money to Donors Trust (directly or through any of their other funding mechanisms) … or it is likely that your initial claim of the lack of affiliation between Donors Trust and the Kochs is likely to be wrong.

Before talking about “nutcases” … can you admit that your original assertion was far too broad to be backed up by any evidence you have, or that you’ve at least ahared?

b) A personal statement by you that you are absolutely unaware of any funding for Antiwar.com from the Kochs that could be construed as quid pro quo when you defend them in the public square … and your reputation for integrity can stand and fall in the future based on whether any such financial ties are ever unearthed and made public.

However, if the integrity of your writing is at issue, you’re not doing yourself a favor by seeming to be overtly applying for Koch funding through your followup comments … “I wish the Kochs would donate” … and we are just the sort of group he’s always dreamed of funding — one that is a) self-supporting & b) grateful to its donors. Grateful enough, that is, not to attack them in the public square.

In combination, those pleas suggest that your publishing this piece here is more a flirtation with the Koch funding empire … a flattering puff-piece intended to get their attention … and you follow it by assuring them that would you receive funding, you would certainly be ingratiated to them in some way.

All of which leads me to believe if there was something about the Kochs that you found particularly distasteful, or if there was something about the Mother Jones piece that you felt wasn’t properly critical of them given some knowledge that you possessed – you certainly wouldn’t be sharing it with us here. Am I off the mark here?

Philadelphialawyer, you’ve twice now, I believe, used the word “reactionary” to describe the Kochs. That may please you to do so, but as for me, I’d like to strike the word, or at least its very negative connotation, from the political lexicon. That is because just about everybody is a reactionary in some sense.

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, complete with a Republican Senate, liberals were quick to decry the changes of things they thought settled, once and for all. They were pining for the “consensus” of Camelot and The Great Society, if not The New Deal. When Marx and Engels used Lewis Morgan’s description of life in the long ago (contradicted by more recent anthropology, btw) to describe the future Communist society, they too were being reactionaries. Nor is there necessarily anything wrong with this. It’s quite a ridiculous presumption to believe that every thing a society did in the recent past was right, and all it did in more distant times was in error.

Thanks for the review. I probably won’t get around to reading this book, but you have given me a sense of the Kochs that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, and it is a surprisingly positive one. I’ve pretty much considered myself against just about everything these people stand for, but it turns out they have some quite admirable qualities.

Could someone please explain one thing to me? What is it about Barack Obama that makes otherwise thoughtful, decent people into raving lunatics? By any objective measure, Mr. Obama has governed from well within the mainstream of post-war US presidents. He’s not the most dynamic or effective leader, but he’s far from the worst in my lifetime. Despite the most fervent efforts of the Republicans, the lights have mostly stayed on, and the government (I know, it’s evil, but we did hire the man to administer it) has mostly stayed in business.

And yet, men like the Koch brothers were willing, twice, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in quixotic campaigns for the likes of Senator McCain and Mr. Romney, men who have no more claim to the mantle of “libertarianism” than I do. Both of whom would have had us in numerous shooting wars in the last couple of years that Mr. Obama has somehow managed to stay more or less clear of.

It strikes me as so irrational that I can almost accept the (unfair, I believe) charge from Democrats that it’s all based in racism. I don’t believe it is: I live in the deep South, grew up here and have a pretty good handle on that subject. But there’s something as malevolently pathological in the hate, and the sheer unchristian lack of basic temperance and charity as any racism I’ve ever come across.

As much as you tried to paint them sympathetically, Mr. Raimondo, in the end, just by telling their story, you made it clear what their problem is. They have so much money that their particular obsessions and flaws get amplified.

The Kochs probably aren’t any more mistaken about things than the average businessman. But they are very full of themselves. However hard their father may have worked them as children, there’s no real egalitarianism there. Maybe “meritocracy,” of a kind.

They are indeed capitalists who expect respect & power due to their capital, even when they are wrong on the facts (as, most destructively, on climate change and environmental regulation in general).

A better way for them to have been taught egalitarianism as youths would perhaps have been that recommended to the rich young ruler in Mark 10:21.

Justin, you speak of the two strains of libertarianism perhaps coming together. I read your article, and have followed libertarians for at least the past 15 years, and cant really detect a predictable policy difference from Rothbard to Paul to Cato to Reason, although maybe a slight stylistic difference. Has the libertarian movement really let a personal quarrel balkanize it? Do the different sides, from what you can tell, respect each other’s contributions?

I used the term “reactionary” only in its most usual political sense, eg politics which seek to return to past practices, particularly from what might be called a Right perspective. As I said, that means undoing the Great Society, the New Deal and the Progressive Movement. Whether you think those aims are good or bad, they are what is usually meant by reactionary. If the term itself, apart from its actual meaning, is offensive, well then, fine, forget the term, and just substitute, for example, “politicians who want to undo the Great Society, etc” for “reactionary politicians.” My claims hardly stand or fall on the term itself.

It is worth noting Balconesfault is persisting in perpetuating a lie in several comments re: Antiwar.com’s funding. Antiwar.com receives no funding from any Koch, any Koch institution or any interns from any organization which the Kochs support. If h/she can proffer such evidence, h/she would do so under his actual name and not a cutesy handle. Given the implication and what is at stake perhaps, h/she is the one who should be making a full disclosure.

If you own a sizeable chunk of the fossil fuel industry, as the Koch’s do, then accusing your firm as contributing to global warming is not a smear – it’s a fact.

The Koch’s have every right to contribute to whoever and whatever cause they believe in. No one should disagree with that. What Reid is intending to highlight is not so much the Kochtopus but the inequality of wealth and income that makes the voice and influence of outsized wealth so much louder and more caustic to democracy. Charles and David are among the most activist Plutocrats we have with the ability to buy entire legislators, university economics departments (i.e. FSU)and even several governors.

One need look no further than their home state of Kansas where today’s editorial in the NY Times echoes reporting by others on how damaging is the Koch agenda to a state economy and, by implication, to the nation as a whole.

And speaking of smears, Barack Obama, that Kenyan, Socialist, who hates America, “pals around with terrerists,” entices illegal immigrants, is worse than Nixon on abusing the IRS, caused the Gulf Oil Spill, creates high prices of gas at the pump, caused the death of Embassador Stevens in Benghazi, and whose stimulus and ACA are job killers, has set the bar for being on the receiving end of smears. If Chuck and David Koch wanna play in that arena, they should get out their rain slickers. At least they aren’t black.

@Angela Keaton says: It is worth noting Balconesfault is persisting in perpetuating a lie in several comments re: Antiwar.com’s funding. Antiwar.com receives no funding from any Koch, any Koch institution or any interns from any organization which the Kochs support.

As I stated before, Justin declared here that he does not personally know of any funding for Antiwar.com that comes from the Koch Brothers. I certainly accept that in lieu of evidence to the contrary. I don’t see the perpetuation of a lie.

Antiwar.com is largely funded by an organization which receives monies from individual donors who in Justin’s words “earmark their money to specific nonprofits”. Unless Justin knows where all the Donors Trust money that Antiwar.com receives comes from, it seems that there is a possibility that some of it comes from the Kochs.

That is a fundamental problem with the nature of institutional giving on the right, where as I noted before shells and networks of giving are used to shelter donors from association with their funding recipients, and vice versa. I am sorry that Antiwar.com has to receive their money from a funding mechanism rather than from named donors, but I can understand the need to keep the lights on.

Mind you, funding from the Kochs is not in and of itself damning. They are not in my opinion evil demons, but rather very opinionated and wealthy rich men who believe that spreading disinformation in order to get people to support their political agenda is fair play. Some of their agenda may be good, some I believe is very harmful, but I do not believe that they intend to destroy America or the earth or whatever.

Anyway, as I noted before in reference to Jason’s obvious courtship of the Kochs herein, my suspicion is that if there was something about the Kochs that he found particularly distasteful, or if there was something about the Mother Jones piece that he felt wasn’t properly critical of them given some knowledge that he possessed – he wouldn’t be sharing it with us here. Sadly, his open pandering in the comments somewhat tarnishes any tone of objectivity that he tried to portray in his review of Schulman’s book.

Anyway, once again, isn’t this veil of secrecy for donors harmful to an open discourse? Clearly some people can be hired to say or not say things given the right amount of money. You are free to, for example, question my motives and associations based on the privacy I maintain via my nom de plume, but that does mean my questions do not have merit.

One huge arm of the Kochtopus that needs to be exposed is all the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and the state versions. The Kochs have created or infiltrated virtually all of the organizations that are now firmly in control of the marriage debate, like NOM and FRC and ADF, and muzzled them with gag orders not to talk about reproductive rights, to effectively make a losing argument that opens the door for transhumanism and designer babies and creating offspring for same-sex couples (Paul Singer is another rich guy funding that endeavor.)

Someone should investigate the Koch’s stealth funding of marriage groups, and their true goals. It is treason what they are doing to America.

AFP has been telling the grassroots to sit down and shut up about immigration, using the deeply lame excuse that amnesty is “just a social issue” and the deeply dishonest claim that they themselves “have no position” on it, all of which is bunk, as you know and I know.

You know this — you were there when this deception unfolded in Florida regarding Rubio, and the way they helped him paper over his contemptuous selling-out of the people who put him in office, people who put him in office on the specific grounds that he would be true to his audio-taped promise to oppose amnesty.

Rubio, the Kochs, and their national staff just don’t feel ordinary Americans are entitled to opinions — and most especially activists in the Tea Party.

They presume to own those grassroots, employing sleazy operatives and sleazier tactics — including ugly insinuations, carefully planted — to pressure them to stay in line and keep quiet on immigration. They hand out walking-around money better than anyone I’ve encountered since the Bill Campbell machine — and with it demands that people keep silent when they get their cash, all the better to sow dissent among the grassroots and control them.

Just look at their chosen national director of grassroots — who actually goes by the twitter name “The Real Slim Sladey.” As in, Eminem wannabe. Now there’s a conservative icon. We’re sick of this nonsense.

Their chosen tactics say a great deal about their real view of the people they claim as “members” of AFP when they need those numbers to push a state bill (many if not most of whom have no idea they’re being counted and used this way).

So now let’s talk about their real relationship to Rove and Rove’s amnesty agenda. Enough with the fluff, the diversions, the gossip. Let’s talk about the real issues and where they really stand on them and why they’re not telling the truth about it — especially to the people they claim to be speaking for.

Also, for the record, aren’t you supposed to do some type of disclosure when you write stuff like this?